The Autobiography of Dr. Annie Caroline Smith (Feb. 7, 2000 from Donnette Smith)

 The Autobiography of Dr. Annie Caroline Smith (Feb. 7, 2000 from Donnette Smith)

My parents, James Smith and Sarah Jane Stephens, were married at Thaxted, Essex,

England. My mother’s father had been a Baptist minister and had died at Thaxted, and my

grandmother had never left the place. My mother’s father was a Welshman, and my mother’s

mother had been born and brought up in Wales--although she said she was NOT Welsh but ALL

English. My parents went to India in the year 1866, soon after their marriage, where my father

was going to work for the London Missionary Society, (a Roman Catholic Organization). That was

before the Suez Canal was opened, and they went in a sailing ship around the Cape of Good Hope.

The voyage took about three months. There was no refrigeration on the ships in those days and no

laundry facilities as there are today. My mother had to take enough dresses to last the voyage.

She sewed and sewed to get enough dresses to last the whole three months. When we arrived in

India, she had one clean dress left. Mother was so tiny, and young looking, with lovely golden

curls. Once on the boat, Father walked away from her for a few minutes and someone said, “Your

pa went that way.” They arrived at Bombay in India and left the ship there.

There was no railway to their destination then, and I think they must have gone down the

west coast of India in some small ship, for they had to travel to Belgaum, their destination.

Finally up a range of hills called the West-Ghauls, my mother was carried in some kind of a

litter. My father, perhaps rode, or walked. I never heard him say. They rose up from sea level,

up a range of hills to about 2000 feet or so above to a place called Belgaum, which was the civil

head-quarters of a district and also Belgaum was a Military station. So there were other

Europeans there as well as the missionaries stationed there. We lived in a mission house inside

an old fort. There were two entrances to the fort. The one we generally used and another one, the

bigger gate, which had some old ruins beside it. That one we didn’t generally use. We didn’t see

the military people much, They were in a big enclosure. But we used to hear the bugle calls and

we knew all the bugle calls. The whole regiment wasn’t there. There’d be one company. The

Regiment lived about two miles up. There was always the battery of Artillery. Mostly they were

English. And they would be paraded to the Anglican Church (Episcopalian). But once there was a

Scottish regiment and they were mostly Presbyterian, and m father and the other missionary

acted as chaplains, and they had the use of the Anglican Church while the regiment was there.

Another time we had a Wesleyan regiment. But mostly they were Anglican regiments. Our

mission had a small church and any who were not Episcopalian, who were Wesleyans or

Presbyterians or anything else, would come to our church. They wouldn’t be paraded, but they

could come. My father and his colleague always had a service on Sunday morning in English for

anyone who would like to come to it.

The Society generally had two missionaries stationed there. One in charge of the church

there, and of work outside in the smaller towns and villages round about, and the other as Head

Master of a school for Indian boys. My father’s special work was with the school for boys. But

first of all, he had to get to work and study the language, in which he would have to have

examinations. The language he studied was called Canarese. It is one of a group known as

Dravidian languages. Belgaum is on the border line where two languages meet. In the town itself,

Maharathi, a quite different language was also spoken, and also to the west and north. Maharathi

is one of the Indo-European languages. My mother learned Canarese as well as my father--and

some years later she learned maharathi also, as she found she needed it in a school she started

for girls, and when she visited women in the town. Of course, my father had at times to help

with holding church services and other things. Also he used to give out medicines like quinine

for malaria, and other simple drugs for other ailments. He had had some special instruction

such lines before he went to India.

The school was known as the London Mission High School. Bible lessons were given daily

as well as ordinary school subjects and English was taught in each class. Those who passed the

final exams could go on to the University if they wished or they could get into various

government posts.

My mother was always so sweet and so loving and everyone took to her. I don’t think

anyone was afraid of my mother. I remember when we were kids, my father could make us

afraid. He was very kind. But we had a holy respect for him. If he said, “No,” we never dared do

anything.

He was very fond of gardening. We had a big garden and he took a lot of trouble with it. He

tried to grow apples. He used to get apple trees, young, small apple trees from England, but it

was much too hot for apples. One year we had a little apple tree about three feet high and it set

one or two little apples. You know how children are. Oh, that little apple looked so pretty, and I

put my finger on it and it fell off. Oh, wasn’t I frightened. I remember going to my father and I

said, “I only just put my finger on it and it fell off.” I was afraid I was going to get a--not a

licking, her never whipped us--but I thought I was going to get a real scolding, or put in the

corner or something bad. But he said, “All right, you couldn’t help it. It was too ripe. It

wouldn’t have fallen if it hadn’t been too ripe.” But he couldn’t grow apples. It was too hot. The

weather wasn’t just right. Another thing he tried to grow was grapes. But unfortunately, the

heavy rains came just as the grapes should be ripening. If we had had another fortnight to three

weeks they could have ripened maybe. But the rains came just as they were to ripen. So he had to

give up on the apples and grapes. He did love gardening, being brought up on a farm and

everything.

He used to grow pineapples, and all sorts of vegetables. And we had trees. You wouldn’t

know them. There were guavas, loquats [Ed. Note: Loquat, an Asian evergreen tree of the rose

family often cultivated for its small yellow edible fruit used especially for preserves], and

bananas. Bananas, of course, you’d know. Not a tree. Each steam bears one bunch only, and when

one stem has a bunch and it started to turn color, we cut it down: it wouldn’t bear anymore. Then

you hang up your bananas in a dark place to ripen. Then that root would send up another sprout

the next year. It was really a gigantic grass. The loquats were yellow when they were ripe. If

you can consider a cherry being long instead of round, well, they were like an elongated cherry,

about that size. They had a seed inside it. And we used to grow cauliflower and celery and lettuce

and tomato. We grew tomatoes in the winter time. It wouldn’t be winter there, but it would be

cooler.

December and January you’d be quite comfortable and cool, you know. We lived about

2000 odd high. If we’d lived at sea level we’d have been hotter. But we lived up from the

seacoast about seventy miles from the sea. So It wasn’t so hot as if we’d lived down on the plains.

In November and December and January it would be quite cool. We never needed a fire. But my

mother used to have a charcoal braiser to air the clothes. A charcoal brazier and a bamboo

basket thing over it. We wouldn’t find the charcoal brazier too much. It used to be quite nice.

Then it would begin to get hot, warm up, about April. The school holiday there was the middle of

April to the beginning of June, because in June the rains came. When the rains begin to come it

begins to get cool. Where we lived, in June the weather would be light and drizzly and small

showers and in July it came pelting down. We had a lot of thunder storms when the rains were

on the way. And after the rains went it would get muggy and hot again. But in September it would

be quite pleasant.

TO BE CONTINUED. . .

My parents had four daughters all born in India. I was the oldest, born in 1987, then

Emily Mary in 1869, Florence Jessie in 1871 and May Ethel in 1874. Our house had wide steps

in front we jumped on, when we were children, and we played with dolls when we were young,

English dolls. We didn’t have Indian dolls. The last doll I had--it had a wax face and it was

getting broken and decrepit, and my youngest sister was about eighteen months or two (years).

You know what I did with that doll one day? I got a little saucer and melted my doll’s wax face and

made little candles of it. It was wax, you see, pure wax. And that was the end. Little wax candles.

That was the last doll I ever had. We had birthday presents when we were young, but they were

never wrapped in paper or had ribbons. We celebrated Christmas, but we didn’t have a tree or

presents or Father Christmas. A friend in India who had a store gave us a few raisins or candies.

We had a nicer dinner than usual on Christmas and dressed in nice clothes. I was a grown woman

before I saw a Christmas tree.

My mother taught us our lessons until we went home to England. She didn’t do the

housework, you see. We had servants. We had a cook and a man to do the sweeping and cleaning.

They’re accustomed there to do those things. If you have children you have a woman, called an

“ayah,” to look after the children.

But in the north of India, up where I lived later, in the Punjab, the seasons were quite

different. In the wintertime, it was quite cold. People up there, just about Christmas or New

Years, they’d have to protect their tomato plants a little bit in case there would be a frost. I

heard of people who lived there long ago say how they used to get ice in the Punjab in

wintertime. They dug shallow wide beds, filled them with water, and early in the morning

before the sun was up it would be frozen. They’d go and pick up the ice and put it deep down in a

hole and cover it up. In the summer they’d get a little ice. But nowadays, of course, oh, even

before I left, people started to have refrigerators. When I was a girl, I remember in Bombay,

seeing a great big place where they used to keep ice. They used to bring the ice from Norway and

Sweden in ships, and put it in this great hole in the ground with a great big cover on it.

My father’s first furlough was in the spring of 1877. We had to go down from Belgaum

to the sea coast in vehicles drawn by two bullocks. The vehicles were something like a big box on

wheels, with seats. At night, we stopped at regular stages, where there were buildings called

“Travellers Bungalows.” It took us three or four days to reach the coast. Then we got into a

small coastal steamer which took us to Bombay. At Bombay, we went to a hotel for a day or two

and finally got onto a big steamer which brought us through the Suez Canal which was now open.

The ship took us to Liverpool. Next we went by train from Liverpool to London. I remember

being absolutely delighted with the green meadows, full of buttercups and daisies which I saw

from the carriage windows.

The missionaries had a year and a half furlough. It wouldn’t be worth while having a

shorter one, coming all the way from India. The missionaries left Indian at the beginning of the

hot season, and returned a year and a half later at the beginning of the cool season. That way they

missed two hot seasons. The men missionaries had a furlough every ten years while the women

missionaries had one every five years. In the Church of Scotland, where I worked, and most of

the other missionary societies, the women had a furlough every five years and the men six or

seven. But in the old days, in the London Missionary Society, then men were out for ten years at

a time. Well, the comings and goings are so much quicker now, I think people get the holidays a

little oftener. Perhaps they don’t have them quite so long, but they get them a little oftener.

A furlough was not all holiday. My father had to go anyplace that the London Missionary

Society sent him to, to tell about the work of the mission in India. So he was quite a lot away, and

had to live where trains were convenient. So on both his first and his second furloughs we lived

in a town called Saffron Waldon, in North Essex, about seven miles from Thaxted where my

mother’s mother and sister were living.

When my parents went back to India, Emily and Florence and I were put in a boarding

school for the daughters of missionaries. May was too young and was with my mother’s mother

and sister in Thaxted. When the Christmas holidays came and we went to Thaxted, our

grandmother and Aunt were shocked by Emily’s looks. The doctor said she must not go back. She

somehow could not stand the life of the big boarding school. So she stayed at Thaxted and went to a

small school there. May went there until she was seven or eight and then she joined Florence and

me at the boarding school. We didn’t have parties at the school. I was a boarding school, you

know, and we never had anything like that. We just had school. We were all boarders. There

were no day pupils. All our parents were abroad somewhere. Once a year, the school had our

pictures taken and sent them to our parents. And at holiday times we went to our grandparents.

At Christmas and Easter, we went to Thaxted (for three weeks each) and at the summer holiday

(six weeks) we went to Grandpa Smith’s at Wretchwick.

At the boarding school, the girls had to get up when a bell sounded. Then there was a bell

for breakfast and another bell to make their beds. Then lessons. Dinner was not fancy, but good.

Then more lessons. Sometimes they went for a walk, two by two down the street. After supper

the little girls went to bed while the big ones went into the schoolroom and the head teacher read

from a book to them before bedtime. There were no parties or dances of any kind at the school.

When I was 14 we got the news that we had a brother, James Edward. But we never saw

him. When I was 18 and Emily nearly 17, we left England in the care of another missionary and

his wife to join our parents. (The three older girls went to India soon after finishing the

boarding school.) They were to go to Madras and so we were to go to Madras also. Our ship

stopped at Columbo, in Ceylon, and there we got a letter from our father and mother saying we

would never see our little brother because he had died on Nov. 17, which was May’s birthday,

after a very sudden and short illness, said to have been diphtheria. Of course, that made a great

difference to our joy in seeing our parents and their joy in seeing us again. It was a terrible

blow to my parents. Our parents next furlough was due in 1888. That was the year I was 21.

And my father and mother and Emily and I all came back to England in the spring of 1888. We

went again to live in Saffron Walden for a year. In June 1889, my grandmother Stephens died,

and in November of that same year Grandmother Smith died. My father left England in the

autumn of 1889. When he said goodbye to his mother, she was very ill and he heard of her death

when he reached Bombay. When Florence left school, Emily and she and my mother’s sister went

to India to join my father and mother. I began studying up for my entrance exam before being

able to start the medical school.

In the spring of 1897, my father came home on his last furlough. My sister Emily had

been with my father and mother in Belgaum and she came home with them. They lived in North

London during that furlough as my Grandfather Smith had died by then and Wretchwick had, of

course, been given up, and Edith and Beatrice had gone to Salt Lake City. I was away in the

Punjab by then. My father went back to India for the last time in the autumn of 1898. A few

years later the London Missionary Society gave up their mission in Belgaum to another society,

an American one, I think, as Belgaum was so far away from all their other stations, and my

Father and Mother went to a place called Bangalore, further inland, for their last bit of time

about two or two and a half years.

Now I must go back a little and tell you about myself and my sisters. We had all moved

about a good bit. Emily had been in India with my father and mother and she came back with them

to England. Florence had gone to India, but after a year or so there she had come back to England,

and she had been in the south of France and in Switzerland. She had been in schools mostly I

think Mae did very well in school and was able to skip a grade. When she finished school, there

wasn’t anything for her to do except repeat the last grade again. The, since it would only be a

year until our parents would have another furlough, she wasn’t sent to India. She went, instead,

to the University College of Wales, in Aberystwith and took her arts course there and got her

B.A. London degree. I had been in Edinburgh, Scotland, studying medicine and had gone out to what

is now called West Punjab, Pakistan, to do medical work for the Church of Scotland.

When my father and mother went back to India in the autumn of 1898, they went back

alone. But Emily went back there the year after, and married a man called Tom Keith whom she

had met out there. He was a sergeant in the East Yorkshire Regiment and the regiment had been

just moved from Belgaum to a place not very far away to a place called Bellary. It was just about

the time of the Boor War in South Africa, and some of the prisoners of war were sent to Bellary.

Emily’s husband’s regimental duties brought him in touch with these prisoners quite a lot.

While the regiment was in Bellary, Emily’s only child, a boy, was born, but it lived only two

days. She had been having a good deal of fever (malaria) so common in India. After some time, I

do not know quite how much, the East Yorkshire regiment was moved to Burmah. My sister and

her husband were there for somewhere about three years, I think, and then they came home

back to England in 1905. While they were in Burmah, they were moved about quite a lot to

various places there.

Meanwhile, my sister Florence had come to Canada with a conducted party of young

women. She came to British Columbia to work for an Englishman married to a French Canadian

wife. She was with them a year or so and liked them and they liked her. But she was not

physically strong enough to do what they needed. So she left them and after a while came back to

England to get married. The man she came back to mary was Arthur John Hawker. His father and

my father had been fellow workers in Belgaum for very many years and the Hawker girls and we

had been at the same boarding school in Kent, England for many years. After her marriage,

Florence lived in London. Arthur Hawker was working in one of the London firms in “The City”

as the big central part of London is spoken of and they lived in one of the suburbs known as

“Hounsey” North London. After a while, arthur Hawker began thinking he was tired of big city

life, and some friends of his had come to Winnipeg and were urging him to come out here. So, a

good deal against the wishes of my sister they came to Canada in the summer of 1904. But they

did not stay there long. Someway or other they heard of Nelson, B.C. And came here and in Nelson

their only child, a girl, Kathleen, was born Oct. 28, 1905.

In the spring of 1905, Thom Keith’s Regiment came back to England. I was in England

then, having come home from the Punjab in the spring of 1904 on my first furlough. So I was

there to see Florence go away to Canada in 1904, and see emily come back to England in 1905. In

the fall of 1905, I went back to my work in the Punjab, and in the spring of 1906 my father

and mother finally left India. My father was retired from the London Missionary Society.

Now I must go back and tell you about May. A year or so after leaving college at

Aberystwith, she went to Elberfeld, Germany, in the river Rhine country. She was there for

four years. She worked in a firm that did a big business in cards and calendars, etc. . . .and some

of their business was with the U.S.A., and no doubt with Britain, too. They had very long hours

there, but she lived with nice people, and the Rhine country is beautiful and she sometimes got a

trip in the woods on the Rhine. May had come home from Germany when my father retired and

she was working for a time with the methodist Church in a mission they carried on in a part of

London called “The Bermondsey Settlement.” So she was right on the spot. There was nothing

much to keep them in England, so the five of them, my father and mother, May and Emily and her

husband, Tom Keith, all came to Canada together arriving here in Nelson in September. After a

time, Arthur Hawker was taken on by the “Canadian Express Co.” and was transferred to

Vancouver, B.C. and he lived there the rest of his life, working for the company until he retired.

Now, you say you want to know something about me, and why I studied medicine and went

to India. It came about this way. When I was about 22 or 23--my father and mother had gone

back to India, and I was in England not knowing quite what to do. I had tried teaching and did not

care for it. Just about that time there was a lot of talk about the need for women doctors in India.

My father wrote and asked if I would like to study medicine. I wrote back and said I would if the

money could be found. He said he could allow me L6 a month for living expenses.

One of the girls who had been at school with me had been studying medicine in Edinburgh,

Scotland. Her home had been there and through her I got some information. At that time,

Edinburgh University would not admit women to their classes, etc. But a pioneer woman medical

had established a school for women to study medicine in Edinburgh and I went there. When I left

the boarding school I passed the Oxford and Cambridge certificate. But that didn’t go for the

medical work. I had to go in a do a little bit more extra. I had to take a certain amount of Latin

and physics. So I went to Aunt Annie’s school and studied with a tutor. I was 24 before I started

medical school.

After I had been in Edinburgh a while, edinburgh University consented to letting women

take their examinations--but I was not in a position to start all over again, study for the

Edinburgh University degree, and before I could even start medicine, take their preliminary

examination. The medical course I took was in order to qualify for what is known as the “College

of Physicians and Surgeons of Edinburgh and Glasgow.” My living expenses, board, food, clothes,

travelling expenses, notebooks, in fact everything except examination fees, had to come out of

L6 a month and I spent the summer holidays at Wretchwick and did not pay anything there for

my board, but there was the journey from and back to Scotland each year. So I had to be careful.

You can just think how the value of money has lessened since those days. L5 now is about 11 or

12 dollars!!! I started medicine in September or October 1891 and took the final examination

in 1895.

I had to go two miles down from Edinburgh to the town of Leith. Leith was the port of

Edinburgh. And at Leith hospital the doctors lectured to us and gave us clinical work. So my

beginning medicine I took down at Leith hospital. And before I left Edinburgh, the big Edinburgh

Royal Infirmary let us in. For women, they had one medical ward, and one surgical word. That

didn’t give us enough beds so the third ward was half surgical--half medical. We had a special

doctor to teach us in the medical ward and a special doctor in the surgical ward. Both the doctors

we had were real good men. They wouldn’t have us in with the men students.

First of all, we had a course in making up drugs and that. In those days, there weren’t so

many made up and ready to buy. We had to make up more. Then we had regular lessons in the

classroom from surgeons and physicians. Then we had regular tutorial lessons in the wards

from the doctors and surgeons. When we wee in the surgical side we used to go and see the

operations done. And we had to go to the hospital every morning to the lectures. Then we had to go

around and see the patients and have their conditions described to us. The doctor would, perhaps,

ask us questions. Or we’d see how they did dressings, or see how they’d put up a fracture. When

we were on the medical side, we’d do the same. Go around the wards and have the different

patients shown to us and listen to their hearts and lungs, and examine their skins if they had any

skin trouble. Some of our patients were men. I think our surgical ward was a man’s ward. I

studied there four years. I passed my exams, you know. I’m on the Medical Register. Every year

I get a notice from them to see if I’m alive and kicking. I keep my name on just for the fun of the

thing. I’m on the British Medical Register still although I’ve been away for thirty-two years.

About that time, the Women’s Association of the Church of Scotland was looking out for a

doctor for a medical mission that had been started by them at a place in the north of the Punjab,

and as I was wanting work, I applied and was accepted by them. I went as an agent of the

Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Two of my fellow missionaries were Anglican. So you see the

Church of Scotland was quite broadminded in the people they took. They took me thought I was a

Congregationalist and they took two others though they were Anglican and we were just as happy

as could be together. [Ed. note: Remember that Annie’s father had also been a Congregationalist

but had worked for a Roman Catholic Missionary Society.]

Before going to India, I had a short time job in Liverpool and for a short time I also was

in Dublin, Ireland, taking extra classes and practice in midwifery at a very well known hospital

for women there known as The Rotunda. In the autumn, I sailed from Liverpool for Bombay and

went to see my father and mother who were then in Belgaum. Then after a short visit to them, I

went away up far north. The Church of Scotland had six stations there called by names of the

chief towns, Gujrat (on the main line between Lahore and Peshawar), Wazirabad (a railway

junction), Sailkot which was in those days a British Military Station, Jalalpur Jattan which

then was a small country place nine miles from Gujrat, where now the Church of Scotland has a

really big hospital, Daska where there is a big boarding school for boys about 10 miles or so

from Sailkot--and two other places which since India was partitioned are now in India while the

other places I have mentioned are in Pakistan. The two places now in India are Jamnu which is a

native state and Chamba which is right in the mountains--and is also a small native state.

Because of difficulties due to the separation between India and Pakistan, these two Hill stations

are now under the care of an American Mission, as this mission has stations also in India.

When I first went to Gujrat in the Punjab, medical work had been started for women by a

woman doctor who had worked for some time for the Church of Scotland in a big place in South

India called Poona. Her furlough was due soon after my going there (to Gujrat), this woman

doctor left to go on furlough and did not come back to the mission because she got married to a

Civil Surgeon who worked for the government. At that time in Gujrat, we women had no proper

hospital. We rented a house in the city and did the best we could with it. I went there daily, but I

lived with the other missionaries in the house a mile or so away, out of town, where the

Europeans, if there were any more, and the missionaries lived. The British Government had

some officials there--generally there was a “Deputy Commissioner.” He was the head of the

district, and generally a Civil Surgeon, and perhaps two or three others, more or less in

number from time to time, according to what might be going on. Some while after I went there,

there began to be talk about building a hospital for women, by the mission. There were two

wealthy women living in Montreal, Canada and they wished to build a hospital in Gujrat in

memory of their mother. In those long ago days, there was a Presbyterian Church in Montreal

which was affiliated with the Church of Scotland and the minister of this church always came

from Scotland. These two women’s parents had come out from Scotland, Their father had died

when young and had left four daughters. The father of these girls and a brother who was

younger--but who made a lot of money in those early days. He had never married and left a lot of

money to his brother’s four daughters. Two of them had married--but two had not done so. The

two unmarried ones first gave money to build a church for our Indian Congregation in memory

of their uncle. Next thing was for us to look for a site for the proposed hospital. One of our men

missionaries was put in charge of getting plans drawn and the hospital being built. The two dear

ladies in Canada began to get impatient to hear that their hospital was up and all ready to begin

work. But they did not realize that things take time. First plans--then bricks to build with. In

or near Gujrat there is good clay for bricks. So the bricks for the new hospital were made and

burned locally. We did get some marble from Calcutta to floor the operation room. Finally the

hospital was finished and by then another young woman doctor had come out from Scotland and

she and I left the women’s mission house and went to live in the hospital. It was built on a main

road coming from the railway station to the town, diagonally across from us was the Civil

Hospital and right across the street from us was the Gurat jail!!! We had two big long wards,

some smaller rooms and an operating room, and we two doctors lived above and our Indian

nurses had their own quarters. But that is long ago and I have been told that the whole place has

been very much altered since my day.